The Takeaway From This Article
In this article, you’ll learn how and why we need to use App Startup — the new Jetpack library. You’ll also learn how to use App Startup Initializer if the application has multiple dependencies that need content providers and how to invoke them manually.
Introduction
Users expect applications to be responsive and fast. When your app fails to meet these basic requirements, users often rate it with poor reviews in the Play Store, or even worse, they might uninstall the application.
Either way, it’s no good for business. Lately, the Android team is focused on providing better tools like Hilt (to implement DI), CameraX (to handle numerous camera-related issues), and Paging3 (to implement paging comfortably than ever with Kotlin Flow).
Now there’s App Startup library — a new kid on the block. It’s time to optimize the app startup time. The App Startup library provides a straightforward and simple way to initialize components at application startup.
Both library developers and app developers can use App Startup to streamline startup sequences and explicitly set the initialization order. This will save tons of time for developers so that they can concentrate on what matters.
How Does It Work?
Both apps and libraries rely on the components that are created right away when the app starts. Usually, it’s done with content providers, and they are the main reason behind the long startup time.
Different content providers for each library (Image source: Author)
Content providers are expensive, and if you have multiple libraries in the project that require content providers at startup, then obviously the app startup time will be longer than usual if they create individual content providers.
Instead of creating separate content providers for every component you need to initialize App Startup, it allows you to define component initializers that share a single content provider. This can improve app startup time.
The centralized content provider with the App Startup library (Image source: Author)
If you previously used content providers to initialize components in the app, make sure that you remove them while implementing App Startup.
#programming #android #androiddev #mobile #jetpack